‘Complaint card’ to keep city taxi drivers in check

This step has been taken jointly by the Bengal Taxi Association and Concern for Calcutta, a city-based NGO, to help passengers who want to trace a taxi they hired on an earlier occasion. “Each taxi driver has been given about 150 complaint cards. This has been done to facilitate passengers in tracing the taxi,” said Bimal Kumar Guha, general secretary of the Bengal Taxi Association.

But the Principal Secretary of the state Transport department, Sumantra Choudhury, said this system of helping passengers might run into hurdles.

Expressing his doubt over the efficacy of this step, Choudhury told The Indian Express that: “It is a good idea. But I doubt if it will be implemented successfully. It is a difficult task to monitor and check if the drivers are following it.”

The distribution of complaint cards depends entirely on the drivers. Apart from the complaint cards, taxi drivers have also been asked to display the fare conversion chart.

Though the rule of displaying the chart was made mandatory years ago by the Transport department, very few taxi drivers bother to display it for the convenience of passengers.

“We tried to make this step mandatory on earlier occasions. But it could not be implemented successfully,” said Choudhury.

The complaint cards will bear the details of the taxi, the name and address of the driver, the registration number of the vehicle and a contact number.

The cards were distributed to a thousand taxi drivers from the office of the Bengal Taxi Association. In case a driver misbehaves, passengers can get hold of the registration number of the taxi and lodge a complaint with the motor vehicles department.

Based on the seriousness of the complaint, the motor vehicles department can even cancel the licence of the driver. For Jyoti Mitra it was a unique experience when a taxi driver gave her a complaint card. Mitra, accompanied by her 11-year-old son Sagnik, was on her way to Nandan.